


A Certain Kind of Eloquence (In Other Words, There's a Whole Lot of Tongue)

by missmungoe



Category: One Piece
Genre: (well -- that depends on who you ask), Bad Flirting, Belligerent Sexual Tension, F/M, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-31
Updated: 2017-08-31
Packaged: 2018-12-21 03:05:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11935014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missmungoe/pseuds/missmungoe
Summary: Everything about him is loud — his hair, his laughter, his whole too-big-for-this-world personality.The accent...takes time to notice.





	A Certain Kind of Eloquence (In Other Words, There's a Whole Lot of Tongue)

**Author's Note:**

> Every time I discuss the possibility of accents and regional dialects in One Piece with silverscream she reminds me of Shanks' awful 4kids dub, and so I had to remedy it somehow.
> 
> Builds on my personal canon for them, which includes copious amounts of terrible and painfully obvious flirting.

He has an  _accent._

It takes her a little while to notice, because there are so many other things fighting to claim her attention first, and she’s been too busy pretending that she’s not paying such close attention to what he’s saying to even notice  _how_ he says it.

It’s not an obvious one, demanding attention like everything else about him (hair so red it’s almost hard to look at, and the smile that’s so attractive it’s hard  _not_  to look at). And it’s odd, she thinks, as she listens attentively to the smooth variation of his vowels and the quick, laughing leap of his consonants. Like good scotch watered out, his inflections are softened, made mellow by that underlying chuckle that seems to cling to everything he says, every syllable and word and sentence.

But under that again, she finds it, a slight twang in his speech, discovered in the slow, purring roll of a single  _r._ A rich vibrato, but subdued, like honey spooned into a sharp drink to sweeten the kick. It seems to sit on the back of his tongue, an echo almost forgotten but not entirely.

“Years on the sea will do that,” Shanks tells her, when she musters the courage to ask, and Makino pretends she doesn’t notice the way his eyes fleet downwards, curving with amusement. She’s been wringing the life out of the dish-rag in her attempts at feigning causal interest. “You’re on a ship with people from all over the world. Doesn’t take long before you start to forget things. Old habits, accents…”

“Inhibitions?” she interjects, before she can stop herself, and with a glance at his open shirt that fails rather spectacularly at being discreet (the glance, that is. But the shirt, too).

The  _grin_  she gets in return is both an answer and a suggestion, and it takes her a moment to compel her eyes to look elsewhere. Subtlety might not be a particular virtue of his, but it’s not hers, either, although that’s not for lack of trying (and she does try, god help her, she’s been trying since they met).

Going by the grin that’s only gotten wider, Shanks hasn’t.

She listens while he speaks, and tries to catch it again, that fleeting thing that comes and goes but refuses to stay; a slight ebb sinking back on his tongue, before swelling gently with his enunciation, but it’s slipped through her fingers before she’s had the chance to register it properly, and to catalogue the different stresses, the small quirks and tonalities.

“Get him drunk,” Ben tells her, in a rare lull of silence where his captain has relinquished his claim to Makino’s personal space to join in the singing across the room. “You’ll hear it.”

She tries to keep her face blank, she really does. “Hear what?”

Ben only lifts his glass to his lips, and looks at her.

Makino is sorely tempted to chuck the dish-rag at his face.

She doesn’t, because then Shanks is back, and her personal space isn’t hers anymore, although it feels less like an invasion and more like a relief, his presence filling cracks and fissures she didn’t even know were there, everything about him claiming  _space,_  from the width of his shoulders to his laughter to his voice.

He’s still singing, an easy rhythm tapped with his fingers against the edge of the bar-top, and the words sitting under his breath, as though it comes as naturally to him as breathing. As though it’s one and the same, breathing and laughing and talking.

And he’s not drunk yet but getting there, and it’s increasingly difficult to pretend she’s not noticing the accent slipping through when Ben is still smiling into his drink.

She manages to maintain her composure for a whole thirty seconds, but then Shanks looks at her and smiles, the last, lingering note and words of a final refrain offered up like a token, a deceptively tender lament about the sea’s dark loveliness and a poor, infatuated sailor’s fate, swallowed by her generous  _depths —_  at which point he  _winks_ , his grin as shameless as the vulgar suggestion, and it takes every ounce of control Makino has not to seize in place like she’s been shot.

And she thinks it can’t get any worse, but then the word  _lover_  leaves his mouth, the poor sailor condemned as such, or the sea (she forgets, she’s too busy staring at his mouth to focus on what he’s actually singing). He elongates the sound of it, the slight upwards curl of his tongue after the last syllable seeming to hold it back, before he lets it go, and it drops like a shot of hard liquor down her throat, straight through the bottom of her stomach to her core, and she nearly shouts an excuse to escape into the storeroom.

She hears his laughter as it sends her off, and feels his eyes on her back as she makes her retreat, but like the slow warmth of his voice burning through her body, the word lingers in her mind much, much longer.

 

—

 

Ben wasn’t kidding, she discovers later, when she’s reemerged from the storeroom back into the fray, still with her wits half in tatters but clutched with the last, stubborn ounce of self-preservation she possesses that his voice hasn’t stripped away.

He lets the accent slip when he drinks.

Just as the stories he tells her become progressively more improbable, the vowels seem to cling a little longer to his tongue, and the constants have a sharper bite. He still laughs the same, if a little louder, but the accent creeps forth a little bit more with each drink knocked back.

“Another?” Makino asks, fingers curled loosely around the long neck of the bottle. Night has gathered in the far corners of her bar; soft, seductive shadows lengthening along the legs of chairs and tables, slipping under and between like thieving fingers up a woman’s skirt, and the low-hanging lamp weaves gold between the tightly woven straw of his hat, tipped back to reveal his face.

The sweep of his gaze lingers a moment on the placement of her hand, and Makino’s brows furrow, but just before she can ask what that look means she  _sees_  it — the suggestive image prompted by the way her fingers are wrapped around the base of the neck, and the slow raise of his brows has her dropping her hand from the bottle so fast she nearly knocks it over.

His eyes flick up to hers, laughter in them. “Slippery bottle?” he asks, innocently.

She glares, but fears the furious blush in her cheeks renders it somewhat ineffective. “Slippery fingers,” she counters, and with a look that dares him to comment on it.

Her look is ignored, and cheerfully. “Hmm. I’m surprised,” Shanks says.

The purse of her mouth betrays her irritation, but she doesn’t let herself stop to wonder why she’d expected more from him than presumptions based on an old, persisting stereotype. “Why?” she asks. “Because all tavern wenches are supposedly adept at handling—bottles?”

She stumbles over the last word. She doubts it slipped him by, from the warmth of humour in his eyes.

He didn’t mean offence, she realises, but the amusement on his face is so bright she feels like screaming at him anyway. “I don’t like to make assumptions about people based on their professions,” Shanks tells her, eyes glittering. “And I’m sure your bottle-handling is perfectly respectable.”

His smile crooks then, full of sensual mischief. “You have very deft hands,” he quips, and before she can choke out a protest, he’s forged on, “A firm grip, I’ll wager, but friction is a tricky thing. I should know — I’m a swordsman. You need a good, sure grip, or you’ll fumble your sword. Then awkwardness ensues, someone usually cries, usually  _me_ …No one wants that.”

She’s flushed so spectacularly Makino wonders if she isn’t about to pass out (and if it might be for the best, with the promise found in his eyes now, of even worse innuendo than he’s already subjected her to), but, “Another?” she asks, a half-strangled word, and doesn’t know if it’s meant to sound like a question or a command.

From the look on his face, she thinks Shanks might have preferred the latter.

“You know,” he tells her, nudging his tumbler forward for a refill, and she keeps her gaze on the glass, not his hand, tanned skin and strong fingers wrapped loosely around it, the pad of his thumb rubbing distracting circles on the crystal, “if I didn’t know better, I’d say you were trying to get me drunk.”

She studiously looks at the tumbler, and concentrates on pouring his drink. She tries not to think about how she’s holding the bottle; if it’s as suggestive as it suddenly feels, her fingers curved around the long neck, gripping until her knuckles bleed white. “I’m just doing my job, Captain.”

“Mhm,” he says, the low hum followed by the lift of his glass to his lips, and it’s a feat to keep her eyes from latching onto his mouth now, and the bob of his throat when he tips the tumbler back, the glass fogging with his breath and his lips grazing the rim with an obscene smile.

She drops her eyes, and regrets it, finding little mercy in the open shirt that threatens to make her forget that she’s trying to run a business, taking in the distractingly bare chest and the hairs fanning downwards, from his sternum towards his abdomen and the loose sash hanging low at his waist, disappearing beneath it—

She shoves the bottle away and out of sight before she has to look at it another second.

Ben has made a strategic retreat, the traitor, and it’s just the two of them at the bar now, the din of the room behind him barely holding her attention despite the noise level, pushed to the back of her mind in favour of the way he’s enunciating his words, the incentive given by the drink coaxing forth odd little inflections from deep in the back of his throat, and after his most recent glass his voice yields a timbre she hasn’t heard before, a rough-edged, seductive purr.

“One more, my dear,” Shanks says, and by the deliberate stress put on the last word, the slight lilt of his accent sending it skipping across his tongue, Makino knows she’s been caught, even before his grin sweeps, wide and laughing along his mouth. “If you haven’t stashed that bottle away permanently, that is. Saving the rest for a special occasion? And here I thought my presence was occasion enough. Guess not.”

He doesn’t call her out on her poorly concealed scheming. Instead all he does is talk, but it’s not much better, Makino discovers, because he might not accuse her outright of trying to lure out old speech habits, but he’s more than ready to let her suffer for her curiosity, and happily, by the way he’s deliberately rolling his _r_ s.

She’d be more upset about it if she had a mind to focus past the fact that it’s not a diluted accent that greets her now, but a concentrated shot of the real thing, sitting on his tongue like it’s always been there — the way it sometimes feels with him, sitting at her bar like he’s always been a regular, in her business and her life, patron and companion and something that she doesn’t have a name for yet, even if he does. And she doesn’t need him to say it for her to hear the implication, trickling between the syllables on his tongue with the promise of a kiss (and quite likely one with a good deal of tongue).

Except he doesn’t kiss her. All he does is continue to  _talk_ , about every conceivable topic between sky and sea, not a single touch offered, even accidentally. Instead all she gets is the occasional, fleeting glance and the knowing edge of an impish smile, but the way it leaves her feeling makes her wonder if this wasn’t more effective.

And knowing him, wholly, unashamedly deliberate.

 

—

 

She imagines it later, after closing when it’s safe to do so, when it’s just her and the quiet solitude of her bar, and his voice, an always-laughing caress against her memory.

And he has a fondness for endearments, but she imagines how her name sounds, each syllable tasted and spoken, rolled back and forth across his tongue, like the push and pull of a mouthful of scotch, smoky and sharp, or the sea against a ship’s hull, a salt-tinged kiss. She pictures the shape of it on that attractive mouth, and thinks about how he would speak it, laughing or gasping; as a plea, as an order.

She skips her chores halfway through her closing routines, thoughts otherwise preoccupied and her hands finding other means to keep themselves busy, the cool quiet of the storeroom swallowing her sounds and offering nothing else back where she’s hiked up her skirt and shucked every ounce of shame she’s ever possessed.

It takes her a little while, hands fumbling a bit (deft they might well be, but they’re small, slender fingers and knuckles without scars, her callouses rubbed soft and gentle, and his would be different, she thinks, and that’s what nudges her the rest of the way, imagining the feel of them within her, along with the rumbling sound of his laugh, and  _one more, my dear_ ).

She’s so mortified later by her complete and utter lack of restraint she downs three glasses just to drown out the sound of him.

(it doesn’t really work, and in her half-embarrassed, half-sated daze she forgets to mop the floor)

 

—

 

The next morning she can barely look him in the eye.

He takes notice, of course, because she’s not exactly subtle about it, and when he tilts his head, bemusement pulling at the corners of his smile, and asks her, the accent just an echo now but his voice as warm and laughing as ever, “Did I come at a bad time?” Makino very nearly drops the glass in her hands at the underlying suggestion, although for once he isn’t even trying to be lewd.

It doesn’t help that there’s something like the beginnings of realisation kindling in his eyes, and for a whole, terrifying second she’s sure he knows exactly what she’s been up to.

But, “Nice day we’re having,” Shanks chirps, taking a seat at the bar, and the blatant redirection doesn’t even try to be anything but painfully obvious.

She feels like screaming again, but all it does is remind her of what she’d been doing the night before, and the memory has her fumbling so much with the glass in her hands she drops it in the sink.

“You okay?” he’s asking her then. “You look a little flushed.”

She curls her fingers together. “I’m fine.”

“You sure? You seem tense.”

She feels, a twinge hysterically, like laughing. “Believe me, I’m not.”

“Mm yeah. After last night, I didn’t think you would be.”

She fumbles the glass again, and it clatters back into the sink. When she looks at him, panicked, Shanks only blinks. “You seemed very relaxed, I mean,” he says, brightly. “With us. I’m tempted to say we’ve finally grown on you.”

She doesn’t manage to release her sigh discreetly enough, but it will have to do. She claims a small victory, and makes to pick up the glass again.

Then he  _smiles_ , and, “Sated is a good look on you, though,” Shanks says, and there’s nothing ambiguous about the tone of his voice or the look he gives her now, and when she drops the glass this time it shatters.

She scrambles for the shards, and for something to say — anything that will salvage the rest of the morning, and to keep her whole dignity from shattering as well, before she up and announces to his face that she’s been fantasising about him.

As it is, what she settles for isn’t much better.

“I like your accent!” she blurts, with about as much grace as if she’d downed a whole bottle with her breakfast (although at the rate this conversation is going, Makino wonders idly if she wouldn’t have fared better if she’d done just that).

“It’s, ah, nice,” she’s quick to amend, although it doesn’t really feel like she’s mending anything, just digging a deeper hole for herself, as she watches his grin widen with every word that sees fit to leave her mouth. “Is it common for West Blue?” she asks, and considers shoving the dish-rag into her mouth, if only to keep it from running.

Shanks is still grinning. “Variants of it,” he says. “A particular legacy of my mother’s, this one.” He cocks his head, and for a moment his eyes are far away; his smile too soft to be teasing. “I chucked it when I set out to sea. Wanted to sound more worldly.”

“Worldly?”

“Yeah,” he laughs. His grin turns suddenly sheepish. “When you’re trying to convince your captain that you’re _not_  in fact thirteen years old, it helps not sounding like you just stepped off the farm in some remote, godforsaken village.” He slips her a wink. “Not that I have anything but the deepest fondness for godforsaken villages. Every good pirate knows you’ll find the loveliest treasures in the most remote places.”

She’s gaping now, too surprised for the compliment to even faze her. “You were  _thirteen_?”

Shanks waves her off. “By the time they found out, Captain liked me so much he let me stay.” He shrugs, smile crooking a bit. “The accent didn’t. Guess it became part of the person I left behind when I decided to become a pirate.”

Makino just looks at him, seated on the other side of her bar — thinks about the whole life he’d lived before the moment he first stepped through the doors; the little tidbits offered like the occasional slip of his tongue, his thicker inflections and harder consonants (his mother, his village, his old captain).

She tries to imagine him at thirteen, a show of skilful misdirection put on to convince a ship’s captain to bring him aboard, and then all the cheek and innocence he must have offered when he was ultimately discovered.

“You’re making me reconsider the wisdom of that decision now,” Shanks tells her then, and her eyes leap up to meet his. And she’s sure her blush is as brilliant as she’s ever managed, by the open delight on his face now.

“I’ve heard that accents are usually a big hit with the girls,” Makino says before she can think it through, the attempt at a smooth redirection failing at redirecting anything. “I’m surprised you haven’t considered it before.”

His delight deepens, warming his expression with something that leaves her suddenly short of breath. “I guess it took the right girl liking it,” he tells her simply, the accent not an accidental slip of the tongue now, and she hears how he cradles the sounds on it, as though rediscovering the feel of them.

There’s a moment where all she does is look at him. And they’ve toed this line for weeks, stolen looks and touches and breaths, but she’s tempted to erase the whole thing completely now and drag more of the sound from his throat, with whatever means would do the trick.

By the way he’s looking at her, Makino doesn’t think he’d be hard to ask.

The doors to her bar swinging open shatters the moment like the glass in her sink, the arrival of the rest of his crew filling the cracks, and he’s quick to regain his composure — quicker than she is, heart still racing at a breakneck pace and her hands shaking, from his eyes holding hers and the lingering echo of his voice in her ears, imagined and real, the two overlapping until she can’t tell them apart.

A glance stolen over her shoulder tells her that her distraction hasn’t escaped him, and she doesn’t think he has _talking_  in mind when he looks at her now. And if she’d been bolder she might have suggested he keep her company in the storeroom next time.

She doesn’t, because she isn’t — bold, that is.

Of course, going by the dry, enduring look Ben slides between them, Makino doubts she needs to say it aloud for either of them to hear it.

“Oh just eat your eggs,” she huffs at Ben, dropping the plate on the counter before him before striding off, steps short and  _want_  fisting her fingers in her skirt as she seeks an escape, preferably somewhere safe, except nowhere really feels like that, with Shanks’ laughter still in her ears, and his voice, that languid caress of his accent along the words, and  _I guess it took the right girl._

 

—

 

They eventually reach the point where flirting over the counter of her bar eases into something more physical, although she’s not surprised to discover that _talking_ still features into it quite a bit.

She learns that in between everything else (he’s enthusiastic, he’s  _loud_ , he likes her on top, likes her back turned, he’ll steal her kerchief before any other piece of clothing; will tie her wrists and kiss her fingers with no less care than the rest of her), but it’s not a nervous habit, it’s as deliberate as everything else he does, and he knows what he’s doing, like he knows it doesn’t take more than his voice to unravel every single inhibition she’s ever cradled so safely, and every ounce of shame to go with them.

The low-spoken invocation of her name against her is what does it, the first time; the sound of it on his tongue and his tongue on her, the slightest flick of it against her entrance discarding the last syllable, before his mouth shapes the sound in a firm kiss. It doesn’t ease her into a climax, it shoves her clean off the edge, and his laughter is both delighted and amazed when it carries her down.

(his fingers are rough, just like she’d imagined, but there’s nothing rough about his handling, only that same, deliberate care shown, ever-mindful of her reactions, and the feel of them inside her is so good it’s almost too much to bear, they’re too large,  _too warm—_ )

The sound that leaves her takes Makino a second to recognise as her own, such a loud, unashamed declaration of  _pleasure_  that for a moment it’s all she hears, the echo ringing in her ears, between the walls of her bedroom, and punctuated by the almost startled grip of his hand on her thigh. Like he hadn’t expected it, either.

And she might have felt a twinge of vulnerability at having offered up herself in such a way, and so much of herself at that, but even if she does there are few regrets to be found in the eager and reverent kisses cushioning her descent, seeking the soft mound of her stomach, the insides of her thighs.

“Should have known,” Shanks tells her after, sunlight on the sheets of her bed and his hair a tangled mess from where she’d gripped a fistful of it. His laughter sounds sated, his accent thick and dripping rounder vowels from his tongue, savouring them, as though they taste of  _her_ now.

He’s draped himself across her bedding without reservations, stark naked and making no excuse about the fact, one large hand with a firm grip on her rear, his thumb drawing lazy circles on her hip.

She allows her eyes to rest on his chest, the hard, toned muscles that make up the shape of him the long-earned legacy of years of training; a swordsman’s life found in the pale scars on his skin, darkened from years on the sea under the sun.

Gaze sweeping lower, it’s to find him hard, the almost cheerful press of his length against her making new heat rise in her cheeks, but when she flicks her eyes up there’s no shame on his face, only a slowly widening smile that looks curiously adoring.

“A girl of words, you are,” he says then, the smile softening. “I should read you one of your books next time, see how that goes.”

She slaps his chest, grinning into his skin, smelling of him, and of her. It’s warm to the touch, the soft hairs on his chest pearled with sweat. Her bedroom smells like sunlight and sex, and she’s never been more ready to just curl up in his arms and  _sleep._

“Don’t you ever stop talking?” she asks, the words murmured into the skin at his collar. Her eyes have slipped shut, the sunlight burning red through her lids, heavy like the rest of her body, half-wrapped around his.

The hand curved around the back of her neck trails down her shoulder, to cup one small breast. It fits into his palm, a delicate contrast of size and shape; like the rest of her fits against him, smaller limbs and gentler curves finding harder edges to soften, and to lay her claim.

The flick of his thumb across her nipple precedes his mouth, the warmth of his grin around it leaving her lightheaded and the scrape of his beard against her skin prompting a small, mewling sound from her parted lips, and there’s still laughter in his voice when it rumbles out of him, “Let me stay the night, and you’ll find that  _no_ , I really don’t. I talk in my sleep, but I’ve been told it’s delightful.”

Her own laugh sounds breathless and spent, and when he tightens his grip on her Makino moves closer, slipping her arms under his to rest her cheek against his chest.

He kisses the top of her head. Her responding hum trickles out, a small sound of contentment.

“People are always telling me I’ll talk myself into an early grave,” Shanks muses then. She feels the rich tremor of his voice beneath her ear, the slight vibrations, deep and lovely; hears the slight curl to his  _r_ s, and the twang of his consonants.

She starts when he gives her ass a cheerful squeeze, before he quips with an audible grin, accent as thick as she’s ever heard it, “But if death is what my talking will give me, I’d rather it be a little one. And I’d rather it be  _yours_.”

She snorts so hard she chokes on it, and then she’s laughing herself out of breath, all thoughts of sleep forgotten, feeling him returning her laughter, his naked body curved around hers, large frame protective and claiming and just a little bit insufferable, with the way he tries to trap her arms and her laughter both.

A kiss has him yielding, before a full surrender is offered to the careful brush of her fingers along his length, tempting a shuddering groan into her mouth. He’s large in her hand, all of him  _large_ compared to her, but when she nudges him onto his back he goes, strong limbs slack under her touches and the whole of him sprawled across her bed without pretence.

And he’s  _still talking_ , filthy promises and lewd jokes offered up to her kisses and no pause for breath between them, before it hitches with his words at the deliberate grip of her fingers, curled around him without embarrassment where he’s hard in her hand.

It shuts him up, she discovers, even before the first stroke turns a wordless groan of her name. He doesn’t even have the voice to make a quip about her respectable bottle-handling skills.

(understandably, Makino takes the opportunity to demonstrate them)

 

—

 

It starts to feel a little bit like hers, that part of him — the one that remembers who he was before he became a pirate, West Blue waters in his voice, and a heart that didn’t always belong to the sea.

He doesn’t let it slip often, the accent. It comes out when he drinks, and when he’s trying to make her laugh. When he sings he’ll hold her gaze and make a point of exaggerating it, but it’s a conscious effort, made for her, and it’s such an odd little thing to do just to make her happy, but she’s not the least bit surprised that he  _would._

And it’s a distraction, Makino knows, whenever the subject of their approaching departure for the Grand Line comes up. And maybe that’s for her sake, too, but maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s a little bit for his own sake, remembering the young man who’d had a home on land, once, before he found it on the sea.

It doesn’t make things better, not really, but —  _ten years_ , she thinks, and kisses his knuckles, and takes the promise like she takes his laughter, and everything else he can give her.

(it’s more than she thinks, she’ll realise one day, but wisdom in hindsight is an easier burden to bear than hope in the present)

 

—

 

It comes out when he drinks, when he sings and when he comes, but there’s a final thing that tempts his tongue to stumble over old, forgotten habits and vowels, although it brings her no joy to know it, and sitting at his bedside, eyes fixed on the bandaged stump of his left arm, Makino wishes she didn’t have to discover it this way.

“Hey,” Shanks says, voice a tired croak, the word seeming to pull loose of him before he’s even dragged himself fully into consciousness. And there’s a smile in the speaking, even as he seems too exhausted to manage one, and he slurs and stumbles over the words when he tells her, roughly, “You should get some sleep.”

It’s said with kindness, although the dip of his brow holds a quiet reproach. She hasn’t slept in twenty-four hours, and Makino knows she looks the part.

She also knows she can’t lie, but that’s never stopped her from trying. “I’m not tired.”

The corner of his mouth juts upwards, and the word curls off his tongue like a caress, an endearment rather than a reprimand, the two syllables bleeding together, into each other, every part of them touching and the last sound lingering a little longer before he lets it go. “Liar.”

She tries a different approach. “I don’t care that I’m tired,” she says. Pushing her hair behind her ears reveals it coarse and brittle to the touch, and she tries not to grimace at the feel of it. “Or that I look it.”

“You look beautiful,” he says, not a beat missed, despite the fact that everything else seems to take effort, his breaths heavy and laboured. “I’m the one with a three day beard and the violent fever sweat.” He spares a glance at his shoulder, and for a moment she can’t read the expression on his face. “Oh, and then there’s this. God, that thing really took a bite out of me.” He looks at her, his eyes bloodshot but his smile still quirks, tired and cheeky. “This is what I get for claiming I could get you off with one hand tied behind my back. I’m actually more surprised the irony didn’t kill me than I am that the amputation didn’t.”

Despite herself, Makino  _laughs_. She can’t help it.

She can’t help the sob either, clinging to the back of it.

She doesn’t bother reaching up to wipe at her eyes, settling for wrapping her fingers around his instead, tucking them into his palm.

His expression softens — eases from lightly teasing into something a little more earnest. Of course, that doesn’t stop him from saying, “That look either means ‘Shanks, you’re being unfairly irresistible on your sickbed’ or ‘if you crack one more insensitive joke I will make sure it becomes your deathbed’.” He flashes her a half-delirious grin. “Of course, by  _death_ bed you know I mean something else entirely. I’m ready to go when you are. Well, I’m not really fit to go anywhere, so you’ll have to come here.” His smile slants a bit, into a suddenly goofy thing, “And yes, I do mean that as a promise. You know I always deliver.”

Makino snorts into her sleeve. It does little to stem the tears, or her laughter. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry with you.”

“Are those the only alternatives?” he asks, and she tries not to be distracted by the way his tongue wraps around the last word. “I can think of a few more that are much better. Like that delightful little noise you make when—”

One of the discarded pillows finds his face, before she realises what she’s done, and then it’s a scramble to make sure he’s alright, although his startled laughter chases her touches away even before his fingers wrap around hers to keep them still.

“I was wondering what it would take,” he says, and holds her fingers captive when she tries to tug them loose. “You don’t have to treat me like I’ll fall to pieces,” he tells her, but not unkindly. “I’m not dead yet, although I know I probably look like I have one foot in the grave. I really hope I get it back, though, seeing as I’m a little short on limbs at the moment.”

At her unamused look, his grin only brightens. “I know, I’m terrible. Want to whack me in the face with the pillow again? I promise you that you’ll feel better. If you need other incentive, I have a few more comments in store, although I’m warning you, some of them are spectacularly filthy.” He seems to ponder the words a bit, and then, “You know what, some of them are actually my best work, so I think I’ll tell you either wa—”

She cuts the rest of the words off before he can finish, fingers slipped from his to cradle his face, and she feels their speaking, the shape of them on his mouth and the honeyed drip of the vowels on his tongue, pushing back against hers in a fierce kiss. The hand that had been gripping her fingers fists in her hair, and there’s no laughter in this kiss when she sinks her whole body into it, and into his.

Drawing back finds him slightly dazed, fever in his eyes and in the sweat coating his brow, but he doesn’t let go of her hair completely, the unrelenting grip loosening only slightly, before the weight of his palm settles over her neck.

“Don’t you  _ever_  stop talking,” Makino says, the words thick with a sob she hasn’t let go yet, and she can’t tell if she means it as a question or an order, the first a familiar, teasing quip, the second holding the desperation that had been left to fester while she’d sat at his bedside after the surgery and he’d been silent so long she’d started to imagine what it would be like if he never woke up again.

(she can’t remember the last thing he’d said to her before he lost consciousness; knows it must have been an assurance of some sort, but she doesn’t want it to be — doesn’t want anything he tells her to be the _last_ )

Shanks looks at her, smile lifting slightly, and he probably has more to say to that, Makino knows (he always has something more to say; he’d chatter all the way across the river into the afterlife until the ferryman tips the boat and tosses them both in just to escape, but she’s not ready to let him go there yet, not into the river or beyond it), but all he says is, “You’ll live to regret those words one day.”

 _One day,_  he says, and this time she lets the sob go, along with a laugh that shakes something loose within her, but she doesn’t come apart, only sinks against his chest when he wraps his remaining arm around her back. And she doesn’t doubt what she means to say now when she speaks the words against the living throb of his pulse—

“You better make sure of it.”

 

—

 

He lives, and he leaves. Ten years pass. Things change — the world and the sea and the people on it, eddies of a new era stirring in once-familiar waters, reaching even as far as the quiet surf of her home.

She changes — grows a little more wary, and world-weary. She misses  _noise_ in her life, the one he’d brought once and left as an old echo, in her bar and her heart. She misses the loud boys who’d filled it after, gone now, too.

She watches the broadcast of the war, like the rest of the world. It’s the first time she sees him in ten years, the first time she hears his voice (her memories haven’t managed to hold onto it; not the laughing cadence, or the accent, or the way he’d say her name, and  _my girl_ , and  _heart_ ), and she’s never felt so starved for it, but there’s little that’s familiar about the hard, clipped tones that greet her now. There’s no undercurrent of laughter and none of that smiling, teasing lilt to his words, just a sparse practicality of speech that sounds  _wrong_ , wrong on his tongue and wrong in her ears, and when the broadcast cuts off it severs something within her, too.

But the very worst thing is that it  _sticks,_  the memory of how he’d spoken on that battlefield. It sits in her mind, until it’s driven out everything else, those last few bits of him that she’d been keeping; the cheeky young man who’d set out to sea at thirteen, and the captain who’d barged into her life with all the intention of staying.

He didn’t stay, of course. She doesn’t know why she thought holding on to those parts of him would change that.

And he’s not coming back, she thinks, with a detached sort of acceptance. Or if he does, it’ll be a different man than the one who left her.

She doesn’t know which alternative is kinder, or even which one she’d rather have, if kindness isn’t what’s meant for her.

But then —  _are those the only alternatives?_

The memory finds her, a small, long-forgotten thing, like a shard of glass having slipped between a crack in the floorboards, escaping the sweep of the years across her memory, tucked away and safely out of reach. And she finds his laughter in it now, finds his voice; the elusive sound that had been slipping through her fingers, long before the broadcast.

She doesn’t know whether or not to hold on to it now, or if it’s just disappointment it will bring her, trying.

(of course, the futility of trying with the expectation of failure has never once stopped her from doing just that)

 

—

 

She’s on the docks when steps off the gangway, months after the war. She’s been waiting since they spotted his ship, anticipation and hope and longing leaving a twisting knot of her insides, and she doesn’t know what to expect, or what she wants to expect (she’s afraid she expects too much, and that’s the worst thing, really; worse, even, than not remembering the sound of her name on his tongue).

She notes the differences that she knew would be there already — the harder edge to his movements, and the sharper lines of his face. The years have leeched away the last of his boyishness, the cut of his jaw a blade’s edge sharpened long past gentleness, and his features made severe by a thicker beard, a dark shadow on his sun-warmed skin. His eyes sit deeper in his face, more lines at their corners and between them. She finds the weight of the last ten years carried on his brow, in his eyes, on his broad shoulders.

His mouth is a hard, pensive line, the once-sensual curve of it yielding little of the smile she remembers, and the ache in her heart bleeds bruises under her skin, leaving her feeling raw and hurting, but then he lifts his eyes to find her—

The grin cleaves through the differences, but not to cut them away. Instead it settles, makes room for itself on his face like it had never been missing, all teeth and a bright, boyish delight that lights up his whole countenance, and so much she almost takes a step back in surprise. The lines at the corners of his eyes deepen, and she knows then that he’s spent the years laughing, and often, even before he does so now, a near-breathless chuckle that doesn’t even come close to the volume she knows he’s capable of, and all she can do is stand there with her heart cut open, bared to the air and the sting of salt from the sea.

Then he’s talking — an apology first, for keeping her waiting, followed by another for not having shaved first (“although I think it’s a good look on me. I don’t care what the guys say, I’m the prettiest vagrant this side of the Red Line”), and another for not calling in advance (“would you believe me if i said our Den Den Mushi escaped? Yeah, I figured that was a stretch. Truth is I wanted to surprise you, which by the looks of things I’ve managed pretty well, although I realise now that mortified look might also be because of the beard…”)

He doesn’t stop for breath, and Ben looks one second away from pushing him off the docks into the water, and still all Makino has managed is to stare.

His smile softens then, draws his altered features into something she knows, the harder lines making little difference to the warmth that settles across his expression, along his mouth, and deep in his eyes.

“Regretting your words yet?” Shanks asks, and  _that_ hasn’t changed, not the inflection or the desperate fondness behind it, his accent bleeding through, and with more ease than it used to. As though it doesn’t take him long to unearth it now; as though he’s reclaimed that small part of himself, one tether among many, to a life that doesn’t shift with the tides.

And he has more things to say, she knows, but she doesn’t give him the chance to open his mouth again before she’s covered the distance between them, hands gripping his cloak and her mouth pressed to his in a kiss that nearly knocks them both off the pier.

And that hasn’t changed, either, she thinks, his laughter swallowed by a kiss that has so much tongue the feigned mortification from the crew at his back chokes on their own mirth.

She’s always had a knack for shutting him up.

 


End file.
